


Awkwardness Happening to Someone You Love

by CrookedRain_CrookedRain (OurFontIsBigger)



Category: Cricket RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-10 16:24:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11130411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OurFontIsBigger/pseuds/CrookedRain_CrookedRain
Summary: He thought over and over how he should write it down. This is what happens, this is how it goes; you develop a sudden, incapacitating freckle fetish and a rotten fondness for northern accents. You know, the kind of accents you can read a whole landscape into. And then you thank Allah or God or whoever that you didn’t fixate on Ben Stokes instead.





	Awkwardness Happening to Someone You Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lordsanga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lordsanga/gifts).



> // Standard Disclaimer //
> 
> This is a work of fiction and not intended to represent or speculate on the real lives of any person, it's just using their likenesses to write a story.

In retrospect by the time they got to Chittagong, he was already done for but it was during their first innings that he really got that full body, shiver down the spine awareness of it. It had happened when Jonny was out in front of the dressing room, in the heat of the day, face a bit flushed, not really made for this weather. Straight after lunch and at 81-3 so he was nervous but not padded up yet. Reflected glare of the sun had him squinting at his crossword, sweat on his face lending his skin a soft glow, sending his curls into tighter spirals at the front.

Zaf had stood at the door to the dressing room a beat too long; too long for indecision, watching Jonny tap his pen on his lips. It wasn’t as bad, admittedly, as the times when he’d slipped his eyes over to watch him chewing on his fingers in a way that just made Zaf think _oral fixation._ Jonny did that a lot, a nervous tic, staring out at the field, knee bouncing a bit. 

‘You’re a clever lad, Zaf - what do you reckon to this one?’ Jonny had said to him, looking up, ‘Right - horrified, six letters - something, G, something, something, something, T.’

Zaf came and sat down next to him. ‘Oh - uh - aghast.’ he’d said and right away he’d had the sense that he’d come across as priggish. He’d had that way about him at school, a sort of stuttering shy confidence, the kind that even at _his_ school had made people’s eyes roll. The kind of shyness that got misread as false modesty.

But Jonny had just smiled at him, dimples creasing his cheeks. Zaf had always thought of himself as an awkward smiler, too many teeth for his mouth but Jonny had that way about him, could just fold people up into his moods and Zaf found himself grinning back.

‘Oh shit - thanks, mate.’ Jonny said.

‘It’s alright - uh, anytime.’

‘Yeah?’

Jonny was still smiling, bright as the sun set to shine off some polished surface and Zaf felt fixed by it. Sitting in his white plastic chair, backs of his thighs already sweating, a sudden awareness that he had just stumbled upon a novel way to fuck up his burgeoning England career. A glorious gay implosion caused by northern boys and their curly hair and mappable constellations of freckles. 

 

+

 

Back in the county champ he’d mostly experienced Jonny as a slight irritation behind the stumps, talking non-stop in his burry West Yorkshire accent - _c’mon lads, that’s it fellas, four more tonight boys, that’s it._ Almost preternaturally energetic, enthusiastic about any possible chance, shouting _catchit!_ after balls clearly headed on a fielderless trajectory.

Eventually someone would always say of him, something like _you know his dad topped himself and they all found the body?_ In that guilty, ghoulish way people have gossiping about bad news, eyes swivelling, on the lookout for divine retribution. Zaf would frown, as he had learnt to do at university when confronted by something problematic. But this wasn’t the JCR and he didn’t know how to start that kind of conversation in a dressing room, not while out the corner of one eye he could see JRoy dancing in his pants to whatever terrible mix was on the stereo.

Of course, it was different when Jonny was yourwicketkeeper, especially when he’d inexplicable but charmingly taken to calling you Zaffy. Standing on the field in Dhaka, about to bowl his first ball in his first test match, shirt stuck to his back in the saturated air and feeling slightly off because in every one of his fantasies he’d made his test debut in Pakistan. As though the politics of it all would just align perfectly for him, everything falling into place like cascading dominoes. England’s first tour of Pakistan in ten years; in Lahore with his grandparents, aunts and uncles in the stands, three lions heavy on his chest as symbolic as the sunburn on his nose. 

But here he was in Dhaka and filtering through the intermittent crowd noise was Jonny’s croaky voice - _c’mon Zaffy lad_ \- and he’d looked down the wicket at Iqbal and taken a deep breath. 

 

+

 

It wasn’t, strictly speaking, as if he analysed all of his attractions using some framework of revolutionary potential but then again it wasn’t as if he didn’t either. Sitting quiet in the dressing room, like he was still acclimatising to it all; who sat with who, the way the noise came and went, sometimes building to a crescendo as though it were controlled by some underlying force. And he’d let his gaze drift over to where Jonny was sitting with Chris and he’d thought _great Zaf, another middle-class white boy._

It couldn’t be helped though, by the time the self-admonishment came he was already deep into the kind of fantasies that would characterise his time in Bangladesh. Sticky nights spent kicking the covers off, hand slipping on his slick skin, thinking how he wanted to get Jonny down on his bed, on the floor, count every one of his freckles. Study them diligently; how they were alike, how they varied, all the shades of reddish-brown. How it was funny you thought about freckles being an adornment to the skin but they were really just the skin itself, the magical chemistry of overactive melanocytes.

How in the course of his study, he could take in Jonny’s muscular arms and shoulders, the soft features of his lovely face. Come up with an appropriate sampling method, straddling him on the floor, mark out a representative square with the tip of his finger or his tongue. Extrapolate to every cm2 of his body. Abandon it all eventually, distracting working conditions even for someone with Zaf’s exemplary skills of concentration.

 

+

 

Jonny had appeared in the hallway once or twice - when they were locked in their rooms in Bangladesh - knocking on Zaf’s door with an armful of snacks and Zaf hoped it wasn’t because someone - Mo, probably - had sent him to check up on him. They sat side by side on Zaf’s bed, Jonny eating crisps and affably watching whatever Zaf was. 

‘Um so it’s basically a comment on class divisions in Mexican society but set within - uh, you’re not sure whether it is a strictly dystopian setting or just uh - um - a hyper-realistic sort of Mexico City - and it’s you know the kind of psychological ramifications of -’

As Zaf spoke he’d looked at Jonny’s serious face, listening intently, a crisp held halfway to his mouth, pink lips and sunburnt skin and thought _I could kiss him right now._ Their legs were almost touching, all the hair on Zaf’s thighs standing on end like every part of his body was aware of this torturous proximity, reaching across the unbearable sliver of space between them.

It wasn’t what he had become used to, that earnestness Jonny had about him. Zaf was more used to the hedging irony of people he’d met at university and Jonny was so much right there, open and unafraid of looking stupid or ignorant. Asking Zaf questions like he was really interested in his hesitant, quiet nerdery, leaning back against the headboard, big pale blue eyes and the longest, whitest eyelashes Zaf’d ever seen.

Anyway, he could’ve kissed him, that was the point; right when he’d stopped over-explaining the plot of _La Zona,_ right then. When his face was lit up by Zaf’s laptop screen, soft bluish odd shadows and Zaf’s little finger, well, he’d swear it had touched Jonny’s. 

 

+

 

He’d looked up from his book eventually, on the plane to Mumbai. Amid the constant drone of white noise, Jonny was slumped in his seat, head almost on Zaf’s shoulder, eyes shut, mouth slightly parted. His body was slipping; slowly, slowly like a house subsiding and Zaf opened his book again, pretending like he didn’t know that soon Jonny’s head would be on his shoulder, warm breath on his neck.

When he’d next looked up, Rash was standing in the aisle saying, ‘You want to draw a cock and balls on him, lad.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what we do at Yorkshire -’

‘Oh - uh -’

‘C’mon he deserves it like - sloppy sleeper, sleep in the aisle of the bus if you let him - got a pen somewhere -.’ Rash started searching the pocket of his sweatpants.

‘Y’know it’s fine - I don’t mind, really -’

‘Don’t mind his fat head on yer?’ Rash raised his eyebrows, reached over and shook Jonny. ‘Eh! Eh! Bluey - ‘

Jonny groaned and rubbed his eyes and Rash gave Zaf a thumbs up as he walked off, mouthing _you’re welcome._

Once Jonny was more or less vertical, Zaf had told him that Rash’d been ready to draw something rude on his face but Zaf hadn’t let him. He’d frowned and said _seemed a bit off._ And it was near enough to the truth that Zaf didn’t feel too bad about it. Not while Jonny was smiling sleepily at him, like the warmth of his smile was burning the guilt right out of him. Jonny bumped his shoulder against Zaf’s, said _thanks_ and Zaf felt the ripples of it spread throughout his body. 

 

+

 

He ended up phoning Steve in the end, sat guilty on the edge of his hotel bed in Mumbai after stalking Jonny’s facebook for longer than he’d ever admit to. Just the barest tremble in his fingers typing out the number. He’d done a little cost-benefit analysis in his head where he’d weighed up the embarrassment of having this conversation versus the embarrassment of hitting on Jonny only to discover he was some sort of hopeless bigot who believed homosocial behaviour, gentleness and affectionateness in men to be inherently queer.

‘There isn’t some sort of club you know -’

‘No I just - fuck -’

‘Zaf -’

‘Right, of course -’

‘Jonny Bairstow, eh?’ and even over the phone Zaf could hear his smile. 

 

+

 

He’d had a boyfriend at Cambridge, Toby, a rower who’d had that disgustingly healthy look enjoyed by a lucky few of the English upper classes, all thick blond hair and rosy cheeks. Last survivors of the Trinity Hall May Ball kissing by the boathouse down on the River Cam, drunk on champagne and the unreality of the dawn mist hung low on the water. Seemed like a very English idea that buggery was necessarily a part of a classical education, he’d occasionally thought, legs spread on Toby’s bed in his digs, situating himself among a pantheon of men who’d come up to Cambridge and found themselves rather gayer than they’d previously thought.

The summer of his second year he’d stayed with Toby’s parents, in their holiday home in Rock. Little stone cottage decorated - or rather not decorated - in that genteel poverty style. Chipped paintwork and rusting fixtures that had a different meaning if you were actually poor and Zaf had spent a lot of time, bare feet in the sand, thinking about how the average wage in Cornwall was £14,000 a year.

And how when Toby’s mum had first met him, she’d reacted the way people often did when they wanted him to close that gap for them, the cognitive dissonance caused by the distance between his name and his face. And they’d frown and squint like that might better bring his ethnicity into focus. _Are you -?_ his mum had started and Zaf felt tired. 

 

+

 

He’d told his dad, eventually, stood at the door to his office and it’d seemed horribly symbolic, like his mind was stuck on inopportune metaphor creation. Look! A barrier, a threshold, a dividing line he’d finally stepped over and said:

‘Dad - uh - Toby’s my - uh -’

His dad had looked up from his papers briefly.

‘I know Zafar,’ he’d said, ‘just don’t do anything stupid and don’t tell your grandparents.’

 

+

 

Then one night in Rajkot - the day after they’d drawn the first test - Jonny had knocked on his door and this time Zaf was certain he was checking up on him. They’d been drinking in Stokesy’s room, watching Jos and Ben, last men standing in an increasingly noisy FIFA battle. But Zaf’s mind had kept drifting to his book, holding his only beer of the night, glass rim of the bottle against his bottom lip, trying to work out when the best time to go back to his room would be. He’d felt Jonny’s eyes on him as he left, body alive to it and when he’d got out into the corridor he’d exhaled shakily.

‘You alright Zaffy? Not feeling a bit peaky are you?’ Jonny said when he opened the door.

Jonny was, unsurprisingly, a cheerful drunk, prone to fits of giggles, ending up on his back on Zaf’s bed, chest heaving. Zaf felt the magnetic pull of his laughter, all that joy radiating off him and lay down next to him. Turned his head to face Jonny and he’d misjudged the distance a bit, ended up too close. Too many details evident; a freckle on Jonny’s eyelid, the paler hair of his beard around his mouth. Suddenly everything was thickening and flickering with potential.

‘Hi -’ Jonny said, a bit throaty.

‘Hi -’

Zaf’s heart was starting up. _First stage of physical arousal_ he’d thought and Jonny shifted onto his side.

‘Sorry - sorry for being all drunk on yer bed, lad -’

Jonny was frowning slightly, then his rough hand was clumsily stroking Zaf’s hair back off his forehead.

‘Sorry.’ he said again.

‘It’s okay,’ Zaf said quietly, ‘I don’t mind.’

His body was humming like an incandescent bulb, Jonny smiling at him, his fingers slowly, slowly dragging through Zaf’s hair.

‘I’m trying - I’m trying to think of a way to kiss you -’

Zaf choked back a laugh. ‘Yeah?’, he said, ‘Oh -’

‘I mean - uh - can I?’

‘Please.’ Zaf said, immediately cringing.

‘Oh good -’, Jonny muttered, leaning in, hand moving to Zaf’s jaw. Zaf closed his eyes, sure Jonny would be able to feel his pulse jumping right out of his neck. Jonny’s lips brushed against Zaf’s, beard scratching his chin then he kissed him gently and Zaf felt a little like he was falling. He reached out and grabbed Jonny, pulling him down so he was half on top of Zaf. His body was hot and heavy but Zaf always liked that; the weight of another person on you, anchoring you, pressing your nerves right out of you, shivering through your skin to where they could safely discharge into the earth.

Jonny had pulled back, so close to Zaf’s lips his breath was tickling and Zaf got a hand up in Jonny’s soft, thick hair, bringing him closer. Jonny shuddered, gloriously pink cheeks, wide-eyed and right up against Zaf’s body and Zaf kissed him, tongue in his mouth. Kissed him until Jonny was making little noises that caught in the back of his throat. Kissed him until Zaf could feel tension like a rope coiling in his stomach, achingly hard in his shorts and then something tripping in his brain like _wait wait wait._

‘Are we allowed to - is this okay -?’ Zaf pulled back, hands still under Jonny’s t-shirt.

Jonny looked confused; hair all tugged out of place, falling over his forehead, mouth wetly parted and Zaf almost didn’t wait for him to answer.

‘Y’what?’

‘I mean - on tour - oh I don’t know what I mean really -,’ Zaf said helplessly.

‘Oh.’ Jonny smiled. ‘Don’t know - never done it before.’ He leant forward and brushed his nose against Zaf’s, then kissed him softly and Zaf thought _okay, well_ \- hopelessly endeared.

 

+

 

It wasn’t quite what he’d thought his first test tour would be like. Down in the nets with an ache in his thighs and marks he couldn’t honestly ascribe to training hard; afflicted with a constant awareness of Jonny, like he was always in his peripheral vision, soaked in sunlight and looking like butter wouldn’t melt. 

But it was like Steve had told him, there wasn’t some sort of club, you had to take what you could get, some snatched moments of happiness in the space afforded to you. The directionlessness of it unsettled him though; he wanted a map, he wanted diagrams, something to study. The opportunity to spend ten hours in the library, growing clarity and then emerge bristling with knowledge. All this information held at arm’s length, no way of knowing if they were the first. He could never close the gap, wouldn’t be right to even try to.

And he thought over and over how he should write it down. This is what happens, this is how it goes; you develop a sudden, incapacitating freckle fetish and a rotten fondness for northern accents. You know, the kind of accents you can read a whole landscape into. And then you thank Allah or God or whoever that you didn’t fixate on Ben Stokes instead. 

 

+

 

It kept happening, Visakhapatnam and Mohali, Jonny knocking on his door, always Zaf’s door - _have you seen the state of me room?_ \- kept happening until Zaf had relaxed enough to get Jonny up against the wall as soon as he stepped through the door. Get his head tipped back, bottom lip quivering slightly, hand in his shorts and lips on his collarbone until all the little capillaries burst like ripe fruit under his mouth. Kept happening enough that Jonny had him on the starched white sheets of his hotel bed, Zaf losing all his composure, miscuing synapses in his brain, embarrassing words and noises sparking out of his mouth. 

‘Y’know I asked Mo,’ Jonny started one night, arm behind his head, propped up on a pillow, ‘uh- I asked him how Muslim you were - I just -’

‘Oh - god - not very, not enough -’

‘Sorry is that -? Just didn’t want to assume, y’know or offend you or - I mean, don’t worry, he didn’t know why I was asking -’

‘No it’s fine, it’s fine.’ Zaf paused. ‘It’s sort of sweet, actually - uh -’

‘Sweet? I do try - not sure I always succeed, mind.’ Jonny frowned as though being insufficiently sweet might really be something he could be accused of. Zaf shifted to face him.

‘Alright, Zaffy’ Jonny said softly and Zaf kissed him because he didn’t know what else to do really. 

 

+

 

Sometimes in the face of Jonny’s fixed and focused commitment to his sport Zaf felt almost guilty. Like maybe it was some further manifestation of his privilege that he could easily brush off failures. Watching Jonny when he got out, teeth gritted and straight to the nets, re-playing the shot over and over. While in interviews Zaf talked about his masters and how he might like to do a law conversion, like what he was really saying was _this thing we’re all doing, it doesn’t matter much._

He didn’t have Jonny’s family though, he wasn’t raised by Yorkshire County Cricket Club, and it was fine having that rootedness, that sense of place. But it was like you were plowing the same furrow in the earth, walking the same path with everyone watching you, with the weight of God’s Own County on you and you, unlike your dad, had to survive it.

And for all of that he wore it well really. While Zaf sat through a slow days batting, rain delays in April and wondered when he’d begin to enjoy it more. Or when all the disparate parts of him would coalesce into some whole. When he could say, _no I know now, I’m a cricketer._

 

+

 

It was his back that did him in in the end, fitness training in Mohali, grim faced and sweating and he’d just known, _that’s it._ The night before he flew back to London, he’d ended up in Jonny’s room, just this once, feeling like he had to, like it would tell him something. Piles of clothes and kit on the foor; bottles of factor 50 and several boxes of Yorkshire tea on his bedside table. His stomach was cramped up worse than the bug he got in Visakhapatnam and he let Jonny lie with his arms around him on top of the crumpled up blankets and at least three socks. Just an odd sticky moment of clinginess, probably nothing to worry about. Jonny telling him quietly how he’d be alright, how Jonny’d got dropped first run in the test side, but he’d come back, yeah? And it wasn’t really what Zaf wanted to hear, wasn’t really what he was worried about, but somehow the effort was consoling even if the words weren’t. It was probably just Jonny though, in his old YCCC hoody and Zaf pressed his face into Jonny’s solid chest, feeling like a bit of an idiot but in a bearable way.

 

+

 

Somewhere over Iran they’d dimmed the lights and Zaf sat, face illuminated by the screen of his phone, thin aeroplane blanket covering his bare legs, reading the same message over and over.

_Best part of this tour, you were. I kno not saying much!!! I’ll miss u lad, see u over the holidays? :) xxx_

Zaf pushed his glasses up to rub his eyes, it felt almost wrong this pinwheeling happiness amid the stale recycled air, little organic spark in an artificial atmosphere.

And he thought about how one night in Visakhapatnam, after they’d been finally destroyed by India in the test, after the fifth day, Jonny had stolen his glasses while he was brushing his teeth, tucked himself into Zaf’s bed, pretending to read one of several overdue library books Zaf had taken on tour with him. 

‘Alright, just reading, lad -’ Jonny had said, already laughing at his own joke.

Zaf had got on the bed, straddled him, taken his glasses off Jonny’s face, something bubbling up inside him.

‘Don’t understand half these words, only went to Leeds Met, me -’ Jonny said as Zaf tipped his chin up.

‘ - and I dropped out -’. Zaf kissed him. 

‘ - and I was doing sports science - ’ Jonny mumbled against his lips.

‘The best kind of science.’ Zaf said nonsensically and Jonny laughed.

‘Were you just doing it so you could study fit rugby boys though?’ Zaf added, half-whispering in Jonny’s ear and running his hands up under his t-shirt and Jonny had laughed again, looking nigh on delighted.

‘That's it,’ he said, ‘that's it.’ 

Zaf’d woke up in the creeping morning light to a hitch in his breath and Jonny’s hair like burnished copper on the pillow beside him. A scratch on a shoulder that when he was more awake he’d feel guilty about but for now just looked like a trailing lodestar, followed it with his lips on Jonny’s warm skin, his shoulder, his spine. All the freckles under his mouth and Jonny starting to squirm and twitch awake. 

Zaf turned to face the window, pulled the blanket up around him, he’d think about the rest when he got home, wouldn’t be appropriate now. His tongue on Jonny’s spine, counting descending vertebrae, holding his body firm to the bed. He shifted in his seat, imagined instead the plane and it’s location, a little zoetroping image moving on a giddy line while 36,000 feet below Iran rushed by like the flicked pages of a picture book. 

He thought about getting his phone out and reading the message again, but when he closed his eyes he found he could recall it in perfect detail. 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Black Cat by Broadcast 
> 
> I wrote this as a little Christmas/New Year pressie for lordsanga.
> 
> I don't think Zaf wears glasses. He should tho.


End file.
